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A team searching for the remains of Noah’s Ark in a boat-shaped rock formation in Turkey has revealed footage from what could be the "hull" of the vessel.
The U.S.-based group Noah’s Ark Scans has repeatedly said it believes its expedition at the famous Durupınar Formation will eventually provide evidence that the biblical ship is buried there. On Monday, the group posted a video of "never-before-seen footage inside the voids near (what we believe to be) the hull of Noah’s Ark."
It said the team chose to drill into the area after preliminary scans showed what could be a "possible outer shell" of the ship trapping water there, which the group hopes to determine by proving it is made up of different materials than the ground on either side of it. The researchers plan to test soil in the area "at various depths to analyze its composition," Noah’s Ark Scans founder Andrew Jones told Newsweek.
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The boat-shaped Durupınar Formation has long attracted people hoping to find Noah’s Ark. It lies south of Mount Ararat in eastern Turkey, a region referenced in the biblical account of the Ark. Genesis (8:4) says that, as floodwaters receded, "the ark came to rest on the mountains of Ararat."
But multiple studies have concluded that the ship is not there. The most famous one was carried out in 1996, which included a researcher who started the project believing he may find the ark. However, he ultimately determined that the Durupınar Formation had been "misidentified" and is actually "a completely natural rock formation."
Noah's Ark Scans is trying to disprove this. The group hopes that samples it collected when it started drilling in September will turn out to be wood. Jones has said this will "challenge claims that this is simply a natural shape made of limestone or bedrock."
The group has published a preliminary report based on its scans, but this has not yet been peer-reviewed. The team has not yet identified any wood material, with lab test results still pending. Newsweek has not reviewed its scans and cannot independently verify the team’s interpretation. A final report on Noah’s Ark Scans’ findings is expected in late April or May next year, Jones said.
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Inside Noah’s Ark ‘Hull’ Footage
In the caption shared with the video, Noah’s Ark Scans said scans of the location had shown a "clear outline of a hull made of different material than the mud around it."
The group said there was "a distinct band following the boat’s outline" that "appeared different from the ground on either side of it." The team had interpreted this as "a possible outer shell, with mud inside and outside—the kind of pattern they said could fit a wooden boat buried in mud."
Noah’s Ark Scans said it would use information from its drilling to compare with its earlier scans. "We still need to determine what that outer layer is actually made of, and what’s keeping the water in there," it added.
Water can collect underground naturally—the U.S. Geological Survey says that groundwater separated from a larger body of water is "typically is isolated from the regional water table by low-permeability beds" (layers of rock that water cannot easily pass through).
The clip, taken on September 9 last year, shows members of the team gathered around a hole in the ground before the camera is lowered inside.
Barriers are visible on either side. However, most of the footage is dark, except for some water collected at the bottom, shown by what one of the researchers describes as a "shimmer."
He narrates his observations as he lowers the camera down, saying there is a "void" that "opens to the left" at around 16 feet. The camera eventually gets to the water, which the researcher says is "filmy," adding that this "could just be debris on the surface."
"I think this camera is supposed to be waterproof," the researcher can be heard saying to a colleague. "Should we try it?" The colleague encourages him, and he pushes the camera further into the water, getting to about 25 feet before hitting "bottom" and pulling the camera back up.
Noah’s Ark Hunters' Preliminary Report
Many of the scans that Jones is referencing are from a preliminary report by Khosrow Bakhtar, of Bakhtar Research and Engineering, which interprets radar data as indicating a human-made structure beneath the Durupınar Formation’s surface.
Bakhtar described the imagery as showing "organized patterns, corridors, chambers, and hallways lying inside the 515-foot boat-shaped Formation in the Mountains of Ararat."
"Whatever the object is beneath the surface is extraordinary," Bakhtar said. "In 40 years of this work, I have never seen anything like it. It could be a ship. It could be a spaceship. What I can say from the radar is that it is organized, it is structural, and a solid geological mass would not have returned such a strong signature."
"If it was from geologic origin, we would have not seen it at all since we masked the subsurface geologic features" he said.
These findings, which have not been peer-reviewed, are based on preliminary field observations, not laboratory tests.
The 1996 Study Ark Hunters Are Trying To Disprove
The 1996 study, later cited by multiple studies, was carried out by geologist Lorence Gene Collins and former Ark believer David Franklin Fasold, who began studying the Durupınar Formation in 1985, making nine trips in the years that followed.
Fasold, a salvage expert, once said that the length and average overall width of the site was "exactly the same as prescribed in the Bible." The apparent internal structure showed the "same nine divisions described in the Epic of Gilgamesh," an ancient Mesopotamian text that also tells a flood story.
But he and Collins later wrote a paper called "Bogus Noah's Ark from Turkey Exposed as a Common Geologic Structure," published in the Journal of Geoscience Education. It described Fasold’s previous evidence as "circumstantial."
The researchers said microscopic studies proved that materials which had been presented as human-made were actually all naturally occurring. Their explanation of the boatlike shape of the formation was because of natural geological processes, that sediments had been eroded and folded into that shape.
Noah’s Ark Scans is trying to disprove these findings, and the several that have followed it. The group says that it is using techniques that were not available to researchers in 1996. These will enable them to extract samples from deeper in the ground than Collins and Fasold did.
Contact Newsweek editors on this story: Matthew Cannon and James Debens
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